Los Angeles history

Voices -- Mary Travers, 1936 - 2009

Peter, Paul & Mary Keep the Faith

Folk music: Trio's public TV special airing on KOCE Channel 50, new
family album and video feature familiar ethnic and traditional songs
that define group.

March 13, 1993

By LYNNE HEFFLEY, TIMES STAFF WRITER

It wasn't all free
love and hallucinogens in the '60s. Hundreds of thousands marched for
civil rights and peace, and folk music was the galvanizing voice of
freedom and change.

Peter, Paul and Mary, the legendary trio who
helped promulgate that spirit of activism, could be considered relics
of a decade of chaos and transmutation, but for the fact that they've
kept the faith for more than 30 years.

Together and separately,
Peter Yarrow, Noel (Paul) Stookey and Mary Travers have raised their
voices for peace, for a nuclear-free America, to support the homeless
and to protest apartheid in South Africa and human rights abuses in El
Salvador, the Middle East and the then-Soviet Union.

In January,
they performed in the Reunion on the Mall inaugural event, in the
capital where they once marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
"It's so nice to be on the friends list for a change," Travers said.

This
month, the trio has released "Peter, Paul & Mommy, Too"--25 years
after their first family album, "Peter, Paul & Mommy"--along with a
companion concert video and PBS special.

If that
sounds a bit trendy--isn't everyone doing children's music these
days?--it should be noted that this celebratory album, with its
familiar ethnic and traditional folk songs and some timely new works,
singularly defines the group and its years together.

"Part of
what folk music is about is a sense of continued legacy," Yarrow said.
"At this point in our lives, we are keenly aware that we are the
carriers of a legacy that we inherited and want very much to hand down."

And,
with direct appeal for adults as well as children, the concert also
marks a new cause for the group: the affirmation of the family in both
the personal and national sense.

"Sometimes we have to sort of
re-examine classical values," Travers said. "Caring about one another,
helping each other, wanting a better, safer world--those are values
that haven't changed for thousands of years."

Recorded in
October at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Majestic Theatre in New
York, the concert progresses from the whimsy of "Puff (the Magic
Dragon)" and "I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly" to Woody
Guthrie's haunting "Pastures of Plenty" and Yarrow's prayerful
rendition of "We Shall Overcome."

In the video version, old and
young are seen singing along to what Yarrow calls "everybody songs" as
opposed to children's songs.

"It is not a children's album, but
it's not not a children's album, either," Yarrow said. "It does not
talk down to them or infantilize them. It engages them in the
partnership of the generations."

Underscoring that partnership
is a segment in which Travers croons a lullaby to her granddaughter,
while her daughter, seated in the audience, fights tears.

"I was
trying to mix this song," Yarrow said, "and had to keep stopping
because I was so moved by the humanity, warmth and intelligence that
this strong woman is bringing to two beloved generations following her."

Another
connection made between young and old, Yarrow said, is Stookey's
ability to "enter into a child's world of delight and get totally
crazy-silly, and wondrously so."

"A new cultural view of
ourselves" is essential, Yarrow said. "We need songs, films, poems,
theater pieces and paintings that will help people to personally,
emotionally, internally affirm that we do care about each other."

That
the three singers care about each other is obvious in their seemingly
effortless harmonies and shared warmth. The activism that is an
integral part of their lives is in evidence as well. Guthrie's anthem
for migrant farm workers is briefly put in modern context, and there is
a musical reminder that no race is truly "pure."

"I have a sort
of sampler in my head," Travers said, "that--paraphrasing the
rabbinical scholar--says, 'It's not your duty to finish the task, it is
your duty not to neglect it.' If war and hunger and racism were easy
things to get rid of, I would assume we would have gotten rid of them
already."

About the audience's emotional reaction to Yarrow's
singing of "We Shall Overcome," Travers said, "Sometimes it's important
to re-listen to things. He sings it so sweetly that he resurrects its
beauty and the cliche falls away.

"The nice thing about folk
music is that if you don't get it today, it'll wait for you. The music
has power; that's why it survives. It just has to be passed on."